Benjamin's "Angel of History" and the Critique of Progress

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture, 2014

Before his untimely death in 1940, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote an essay, entitled "Theses on the Philosophy of History," marking his recovery from the shock of the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact. This study reflects on the philosophical and historical significance of this essay, unraveling Benjamin's critique of Marxism as a critique of progress. Progress, which the angel of history sees as a storm coming from paradise, has caused a growing pile of rubble of historical blunders and environmental disasters. This uncritical submission to progress, however, can be seen not only in the blind confidence of the communists and the social democrats towards Marxist teleology, but also in historicism, which reduces the writing of history to a form of disaster: a "heaping up of information" that forgets the memory of "enslaved ancestors," thus losing its "weak, Messianic power.

1991

Walter Benjamin’s 9th thesis on the concept of history is his most-quoted and -commented text. As it is well known, his idea of the »Angel of History« appears as a commentary on Paul Klee’s famous watercolor titled Angelus Novus. I think it is necessary to open another way of interpretation through the connection of Benjamin’s Angel of History with the political iconography of Berlin, the city where he was born and lived for many years and about which he wrote in his memories of childhood, his Berlin chronicles and radio programs.

Thrice Fiction 26, 2019

"A rich, albeit complex and sometimes opaque exploration of how one piece of art and one philosopher's interpretation can be seen as a microcosm of the human struggle with history, identity, and the search for meaning amidst apparent chaos. This interpretation is both a critique and an expansion of Benjamin's original thoughts, bringing in elements of psychology, mysticism, and cultural critique."

In his famous ninth Thesis “On the Concept of History” (1940), Walter Benjamin introduces the “Angel of History” by referring to Paul Klee’s watercolored drawing “Angelus Novus” (1920). The gaze of this angel has often been associated with Benjamin’s allegedly melancholic yearning for the restoration of a lost and catastrophically crushed past. Challenging mainstream interpretations of this allegory, Giorgio Agamben asked a simple question: what if the ‘Angel of History’ could close his wings and had his will? Against the grain of melancholic messianisms, Agamben invites us to see the “Angel of History” in a different light. Relying on Freud and Lacan, this paper discusses the split image of Benjamin’s “Angel of History” torn between vision and gaze, melancholia and destruction.

Textual Practice, 2019

ABSTRACT The image of the ‘angel of history’ forms the centrepiece of one of Walter Benjamin’s most famous essays: ‘On the Concept of History’. This text has a troubled exegetical history, with numerous competing interpretations attempting to explain what Benjamin really meant. Few, with the exceptions of Timothy Bahti and Sigrid Weigel, have stopped to examine the fragments’ rhetorical structure or to ask what it is about ‘On the Concept of History’ that leads to such a proliferation of readings. This essay, rather than searching Benjamin’s corpus for the ciphers to decode the fragments’ meaning, instead focuses on the complex rhetorical structure of ‘the angel of history’. It argues that an interplay between grammar and rhetoric induces a multiplication of possible interpretations, and indeed that this poetic density seems to involve an imperative to ‘translate’, both the ‘original’ (German or French) text and its complex relationship with the ‘derived’ English version, both interlinguistically and intralinguistically, as Roman Jakobson (1959) would say. It shows that this complex rhetorical structure actually performs the argument put forward in the fragments about the impossibility of historicist totalising readings of history, yet in its injunction to translate or interpret, ‘bear witness to the unpresentable’ (Lyotard), seems to ask that very impossible over and over again.

Astrolabio. Revista Internacional de Filosofía, 2007

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2020

Representations of historicism as the loss of meaning in history and critiques of historicism as the critique of such a loss had been pervasive since late nineteenth century till the Second World War. Among historicism’s most powerful and representative critics were the young Nietzsche and Benjamin in his Parisian exile. This essay seeks to trace from Nietzsche to Benjamin an unbroken yet growing line of critique—of historicism as the “sickness of time” from which modernity suffers, and from which it has been trying to recover. Two attempts at such a recovery will be examined and juxtaposed: The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life and Theses on the Philosophy of History. By thus situating both historicism and its critiques within the desires and anxieties of modernity, this essay tries to delineate and to understand the peculiarly modernist shapes assumed by the historical and its discontents.

Whenever'Walter Benjamin writes on histor¡ his impetus is to enlighten: how history should be experienced and considered, what a transmission of history would be like that does not adjust to ruling conformism, but saves the remembrance of past injustice and of hardship and pain of past generarions as well as their revolts. These are the questions guiding his philosophy of history. Benjamin strongly objects conceptions of histor¡ which, by trying to identify "the way it really was"t, banish past distress to the realm of "once upon a time" and thus construct history as a completed and unalterable entity. Such way of historical interpretation is always likely to become a mere "tool of the ruling classes"', according to which the past is shaped a priori so that it will not transgress the sphere of the status quo.

Theses on the Concept of History', produced a short while before Walter Benjamin attempted to escape from Vichy France 1 , is a document that accounts for its era while remaining a fruitful source that has the potential to be endlessly interpreted with new happenings over the course of time. The reasons why we have chosen to write on this text lie in the perplexity it evokes in us and the challenge it poses as 'historical materialism' appears to be reconciled with 'theology'or more precisely, as the dormant 'dwarf' of theology inside historical materialist thought is woken up by Benjamin 2 . Being utterly helpless in front of this text that, through a sense of infamiliarity and despite our having read it at least five times, thrusts us back into sheer incomprehension just when it appears to be crystal clear, we will attempt to explore Benjamin before hastily discarding him from our team of thinkers because of our inability to crack open the codes of his theological reasoning. This theology, that we believe is accessible only through only a certain sense of poetics-the poetry of the metaphysical. According to others however, such as Michael Löwy , 'Benjamin's concepts are not metaphysical abstractions, but relate to concrete historical experiences' (Löwy 2005: 21).